Asia

2010

New York, July 26, 2010—The 15-year jail sentence imposed by a Chinese court on Uighur journalist and website manager Gheyrat Niyaz is unjustly harsh and should be overturned immediately, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. The fact that Niyaz was convicted under sweeping “endangering state security” charges is an indicator of how far the government will go to silence journalists who speak critically about sensitive issues in the county, CPJ said.

Tags:

New York, July 23, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned by Thursday’s killing of Devi Prasad Dhital, the chairman of Nepal’s broadcaster Radio Tulsipur FM. His is the third murder of a Nepalese media owner in a less than six months.

Tags:

Prageeth Eknelygoda’s wife, Sandhya, at left, has been in close contact with CPJ since his disappearance on the night of January 24, just two days before the hotly contested Sri Lankan presidential elections. She was a primary source for our May investigative report, In Sri Lanka, no peace dividend for press. As we noted in our alert today, she has started to organize prayer vigils at Hindu and Buddhist temples and Christian churches around the country, trying to pressure the government into helping her locate her husband. Although they have had no word from him, she and her two sons, 16 and 13, are convinced Eknelygoda, below, is still alive.

Tags:

New York,
July 23, 2010—Six months after the unexplained disappearance of Sri Lankan
journalist and cartoonist Prageeth
Eknelygoda, the government has refused to offer any assistance or provide
answers to his wife, Sandhya. The government’s attitude is a clear indicator of
the anti-media polices of President Mahindra Rajapaksa, the Committee to
Protect Journalists said today.

Eknelygoda, a political reporter and cartoonist for Lanka eNews, disappeared on the night of January 24, two days before the presidential elections that gave the incumbent president a sweeping victory that will keep him power for six more years.

Tags:

Before he disappeared on January 24, Prageeth Eknelygoda was a journalist, columnist, and cartoonist. Here are some examples of his cartoons from a show at Colombo's Lionel Wendt Gallery in May. His wife, Sandhya, has given us permission to use them.

Tags:

From today, you now have an alternative web address to visit
the CPJ website. As well as our usual http://cpj.org/ address, you can visit our
site securely at https://cpj.org/.
We've turned on this feature to help protect our readers who are at risk of
surveillance and censorship, and as part of a wider advocacy mission to
encourage social networking and media sites to do the same.

Tags:

New York, July 22, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the Chinese government to dismiss charges against Gheyret Niyaz, a Uighur journalist and website manager, and release him from prison. According to the Uyghur American Association (UAA), Niyazi will be tried in Urumqi, the capital of China’s far-western Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region on July 28.

Tags:

New York, July 21, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists joins with our colleagues in India to express our support and condolences to the family of Vijay Pratap Singh, the 36-year-old senior correspondent of the dailyIndian Express, who died Tuesday from injuries he received in a bombing on July 12.

Tags:

It’s too soon to expect a turnaround in the Philippines’
miserable record of attacks on journalists. President Benigno Aquino was sworn in
just two weeks ago. The problem of unprosecuted journalist murders—the
Philippines ranks third on CPJ’s
Impunity Index—is embedded in a political culture of widespread
violence and little law enforcement. That hasn’t changed, and here are two
cases that illustrate the situation.

Tags:

Pakistan's spirited press is once again caught up in arms over the latest and most absurd attempt to discredit its voice. On Sunday, various journalist organizations in Larkana, Sindh province, followed in the recent footsteps of their colleagues in Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi and observed a “black day” of protest, according to Pakistan's The News.